Whether or not prayer bans are a good thing, I take interest in the "IC action" line.Prayers are an IC action that receives an IC response
If a player is abusing prayer they are opening themselves up to admin fuckery up to and including full round removal
I could even see kick being a divine intervention of some kind
If they aren't getting the message at that point, idk, might be time for a general rule 1 talk or a talk about how spam is unwelcome here
When I was trained, I was told prayers WERE strictly IC, and anyone behaving outside that was opening themselves up to a smite or something along those lines. However the trend I've seen in the last year or two is that prayers exist in a nebulous space between IC and OOC. Chaplains will do prayer rituals to try to get your attention, but some players will use it to ask for a TC trade, admins will use it to talk directly to their friends, and sometimes players will use it to add something to an ahelp that they forgot to say.
There are other means of players speaking IC to admins, namely the communications console. This comes with a hefty warning that if you're using it frivolously you're opening yourself up to retribution from the administrators. Prayers operate the same way and yet carry no such warning, and indeed anyone can pray at any time, including while dead or without having joined the round.
Punishments for making stupid prayers are usually just relegated to a light smite like shoe knots, or sending them a cookie to recognize that you saw them type a thing but choose not to respond to it. This is vastly based on culture however and not any particular precedent other than admins watching other admins. This is also how OOC prayers came to be I would imagine, with admins assuming it's okay because other admins let it slide. Culture shifts happen and I get that, but if the headmins are saying one thing (as Rave did) and the server is acting in another way, there's a discrepancy.
So I ask, how IC are prayers? Beyond that, how IC SHOULD prayers be?